Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

by Steven Pinker

How does language work? How do we learn to speak? Why do languages change? Why do they have so many quirks? What does language reveal about the mind?

Steven Pinker explores the mysteries of language in this original and hugely entertaining book. Pinker uses a deceptively simple phenomenon—regular and irregular verbs—to illuminate an astonishing array of topics: the history of languages, what we can learn from children's grammatical mistakes, the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of language, and some of the major themes in Western philosophy. The key idea—that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules—extends beyond language, offering insight into the nature of thinking. For fans of The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, here is another cornucopia of ideas about language and mind.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Writing, Philosophy

370 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1999

About the author

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.

Reviews

[Lara Messersmith-Glavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Pinker's work is generally very readable, and so he has become something of a champion popularizer of linguistics and all the fun, quirky, nifty tidbits of knowledge that come with the field. Unfortunately, he also does two things that annoy the hell out of me:

1) He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view,

and

2) He had one good idea a few decades back, and has proceeded to spin it out into a small cottage industry involving a number of volumes and essays; in reality, he wrote one book six or seven times.

Words and Rules is, in my mind, the most fun of the lot, mainly because it introduces some pretty fundamental linguistics concepts in clear, accessible language and effectively blows the mind of the lay reader. What could be better than that? Other books, like The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate delve more deeply into his affiliation with Noam Chomsky's ideas of Universal Grammar and the innate human tendency toward language production, or the dubiously named/conceived "Language Acquisition Device." I recommend these latter two only in conjunction with critical, post-Chomsky work on universalism and language development.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

[ante reading]

The book has some intriguing chapter titles, especially chapter 8 The Horrors of the German Language. Picking up the gauntlet, Dear Sir, Mr Pinker :)
__________

[post reading]

From the preface:

This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.

That’s no mean goal the author has set here. At least he didn’t write “will illuminate”, because that, to me, would have been wrong. Elsewhere, however, the author was not so modest in his utterances. It seems to me that the scientific field of linguistics is not void of some strong headed individuals. In the dispute between Noam Chomsky and his early students one even spoke of Linguistics Wars , an expression I do not like at all. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me much. Language is one of our most valuable possessions and anyone who expresses something about language that does not agree with one’s own opinion must, of course, expect a violent headwind. That’s also the reason why I read this book in the first place. Naturally, as a German native speaker, I instantly felt a little offended by the above chapter title (that is, I took the bait). But I do not want to get involved in any kind of war. In addition, this book is not about linguistics wars at all (well, maybe a little, if your read between the lines).

This book is about – now get this! – Words and Rules. The words are mostly verbs, but also some nouns. And the rules specify how to turn a verb into past tense, or how to build the plural of a noun. Verbs, in English and other languages, come in two flavors: regular and irregular. Building the past tense of a regular verb in English is fairly easy, even for ESLs like me. Just add -ed to the end of the verb and you’re done. The case of irregular verbs is far more outlandish, and therefore much more fun. Pinker, it seems, knows all the irregular verbs, and is obviously happy to mention them again and again. Although the context is different each time, I think the sections and word lists could have been shorted significantly to make for a better reading. On the other hand I learned about some verbs (and their past tense and past participle) which I never experienced before, like to geld or to chide.

Building plurals of most nouns in English is even easier (an kind of boring) than past-tensing regular verbs. Just add an -s. Praised be German in that regard. We have five different suffixes to choose from in order to build the plural of a noun (plus three more if you consider changing of a vowel to its umlaut), and there is no actual ironclad rule that tells you how to do it. This fact about the German language is a welcome confirmation for Pinker of his theory on words and rules which he develops throughout the book. In this respect, the Horror of the German language is quite obviously meant ironic.

The whole book is not particularly exciting to read; the author should work on this, but it is also not too academic or even dry. There are some really funny comments included, newspaper articles he collected over the years, cartoons, and even some jokes. Personally, however, I would have been more satisfied with a shorter text. Unfortunately there are also some typos in here. Of course there are typos in every book, but in case of a work about language that also contains lecture-like sections on splling I found doubly embarrassing.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read). How the Mind Works is quite a difficult, though probably worth it in the end, and The Blank Slate - well, I barely remember any of it now.

This is magnificent, particularly on how children learn language and how they make predictable mistakes in whatever language they are learning.

He really does write beautifully in this book, always with a clarity that is as sharp as a spotlight. This is a wonderful introduction to Chomsky and his linguistics.

Chomsky’s view can be summed up like this: how do kids learn a language at all. When we try to teach them we say things like “Oh, coo, coo, coochims, who’s a boopsie, woopsie, darlin’ angel?” Now, clearly, this is not the most obvious sort of instruction for learning grammatically correct sentences we could offer our children. So, how do kids ever manage it – given how crap we adults would seem to be at language instruction. The only thing that seems to make sense is that we don’t learn, but are born already knowing the key things they need to know about languages. Just as walking is something we have to learn, but also have a genetic predisposition towards, so it is the same with language.

This sounds like some sort of mystic rubbish the first time you hear the argument, how could we possibly be born knowing a language – particularly given there are so many different languages – but that isn’t really the point. The point is that kids learn all of these languages in similar ways and that all languages have remarkably similar features. A universal grammar.

I have problems with some aspects of this theory – and Pinker points out elsewhere that it does not fit at all with Chomsky’s social and political theories – but the fact kids have ‘sensitive periods’ when learning particular aspects of grammar either happen or don’t happen does seem to be a very strong confirmation of the innateness of language learning structures in the brain.

For the maths nut in me - being a boy I do like numbers and odd little statistics - if we end up knowing 40,000 words by the age of twelve that means from they day we are born we have had to learn eight words per day. Doesn't that just amaze you?

This is a much more accessible book than this review is turning out – Pinker at his best.

[Deborah Lynch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yikes - I went back and forth between two stars and three stars for this but in the end the star ratings said it all. Two stars - it was OK. three stars - I liked it. It was OK and I didn't really like it. This looked like a slam dunk. I loved the Blank Slate, liked Pinker's writing style in that and I eat language books for breakfast but alas this one was not a marriage made anywhere heavenly. I just wanted it to END. Repetition, repeating yourself, which is like saying the same thing over and over, which takes you back to repetition and is also very similar to sameness. On and on and on. Rare for me to rate down in the one and two stars but this was tough to endure. It was packed full of information but the means of delivery was so repetitive (if you're sick of me repeating myself in this review don't go near the book) it was near impossible to focus on the content. There was very little to lift the book up and out of delivering screeds of information. It didn't help that I chose this in audiobook format. Normally language books are very digestible in audio form but I think that may have compounded the issue.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Cats and dogs.” Say the phrase, and note that the -s in cats is pronounced s, while the -s in dogs in pronounced z. Welcome to the strange and sometimes wacky world of linguistics, where things are regular until they’re not; where some irregular words were regular once upon a time but we have forgotten the rules that made them regular; where regular English verbs have four endings but are used seventeen different ways. For example, in open/opens/opened/opening the -ed suffix is used for past tense (It opened.), perfect participle (It has opened.), passive participle (It was being opened.), and verbal adjective (A recently-opened box). Even so, consider yourself lucky, “The verb in Spanish or Italian comes in about fifty forms: first, second, and third persons, each singular and plural, each in present, past, and future tenses, each in indicative, subjunctive and conditional moods, plus some imperative, participle, and infinitive forms.”

The book looks at how we process vocabulary and grammar, and uses research and some cleverly designed experiments to illuminate the techniques the mind employs to recall stored words and apply rules for regular and irregular nouns and verbs. The first three chapters are a primer on the basic concepts of language; they are well written, easy to understand, and form a good base for the rest of the book. Chapter 4 is about theories of language. The two most common are a connectionist model, which uses artificial intelligence to try to establish rules that can then be applied to new words, and the Chomskyan model of universal grammar, which holds that the brain is hard-wired for certain language constructs such as nouns and verbs, along with a rule set for using them.

Chapter 5 discusses how we use language in real time. For instance, “The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener’s brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second.” There are only between 150 and 180 irregular verbs in English (depending on how you count), and no new ones have been added in recent decades. Interestingly, though, the ten most common English verbs are all irregular: be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, and get. Experimental evidences indicates that the mind memorizes the irregular forms, but applies standard rules for the regular ones, e.g.: adding -s for plurals and -ing for participles.

The sixth chapter is the most fun. It would not seem that an extended discussion of noun and verb phrases would be interesting to anyone except a linguist, but in fact it reveals some amazing bits of information at the intersection of language, culture, and history. In baseball, for example, why do we say, he “flied out” instead of he “flew out”? There is a reason, and the author does a good job explaining the factors involved, unraveling them across successive stages of meaning. (For that matter, why do we say “unravel,” when it means the same as “ravel”? Hmm.)

Chapter 7 deals with how children acquire language.

Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.

The neuroplasticity of a young child’s brain is remarkable, as they internalize grammatical rules and add vocabulary, moving quickly from individual words to verb and noun phrases to full sentences by the age of five, while continually picking up and incorporating new words and expressions.

Chapter 8 is an amusing discussion of the German language. Anyone who thinks that German is logical and methodical has been watching too many World War II movies. The language is wildly irregular, in a way that makes English look like a model of clarity. “Of the thousand commonest verbs in English, a majority, 86 percent, are regular, but of the thousand commonest verbs in German, a minority, only 45 percent, are regular.” In English almost all plurals take -s, but in German there are five different plural suffixes, plus three more ways to make plurals that use umlauts.

Chapter 8 looks at what happens when things go wrong in the language centers of the brain, through accident, injury, or genetics. As always, deficiencies can be studied to show how healthy brains process language. CAT scans of the brain show which areas light up under different circumstance. Not surprisingly, the brain spreads language skills over multiple areas, exactly the way one would predict from evolution’s undirected approach, where it can only apply natural selection to what already exists, and cannot anticipate future developments.

The book was published in 2000, so it is likely that some of its assertions and hypotheses have now been superseded by additional research. More precise brain scanning equipment, along with additional studies and experimentation yields new insights and better theories. Nevertheless, this book is still a good introduction to how language works. It is written in a non-technical manner, and is full of remarkable insights into how we string together thoughts and create meaning.

Finally, there were a number of interesting passages that I highlighted that did not seem to fit anywhere else in this review, so I am appending them here:

- Irregular forms are relics of history. They fall into families because originally they were generated in matched sets by rules, but the rules died long ago and the families have been disintegrating ever since. Vowels drift, consonants get swallowed, words lose their popularity, dialects break apart or coalesce. After centuries or millennia irregular forms are no longer the orderly outputs of a rule, nor are they a list of unrelated sounds; they are a family resemblance category.

- three irregular plurals take the old Anglo-Saxon suffix -en rather than -s: child—children, ox—oxen, brother—brethren

- that is how we got the strangest plural in Standard English, children. Once it was childer, with the old plural suffix -er also seen in the German equivalent Kinder. But people stopped hearing it as a plural, and when they had to refer to more than one child, they added a second plural marker, -en. Today many rural and foreign speakers still don’t think of children as plural, and have added a third suffix, yielding the triply plural childrens.

- Today the old [stressed -ed] syllabic suffix survives in a handful of adjectives: accursed, aged, beloved, bended (in the expression on bended knees), blessed, crooked, cussed, dogged, jagged, learned, naked, ragged, wicked, and wretched.

- [A small number of English plurals] change their vowel instead of adding -s: man-men, woman—women (pronounced wĭmɨn), foot—feet, goose—geese, tooth—teeth, mouse—mice, louse—lice

- In English they can sound the same—[the infinitive form] to open and I open—which disguises the fact that they are different versions of the verb. In other languages the form of the verb that you look up in a dictionary cannot be pronounced. For example, in Spanish you can say canto, cantéis, canten, and so on, leaving cant- as the stem, but you can never say cant- by itself.

- The third-person singular -s, as in Dog bites man, steps aside for irregular forms in only four verbs: be—is (not be’s), have—has, do—does (pronounced dŭz), and say—says (pronounced sĕz). These, by the way, are the four most frequent verbs in the English language.

- It should be “Fellow octopuses.” The -us in octopus is not the Latin noun ending that switches to -i in the plural, but the Greek pous (foot). The etymologically defensible octopodes is not an improvement.

- The participle ‘has got’ is British, ‘has gotten’ American. As with many differences between the dialects, it was the Mother Country that corrupted the mother tongue; gotten was the form used in England when the first colonists left in the seventeenth century, and the Americans preserved it while it vanished in the British Isles.

- Old English, spoken from about 400 to 1100, had three verbs for be: beon, esan, and wesan. They probably differed in meaning, with beon referring to permanent states and the other bes to temporary ones. (The distinction is similar to the one in modern Spanish between ser and estar: Yo soy Americano [I am American], a long-term trait, contrasts with Yo estoy contento [I am happy], a temporary state.)

- Beon supplied the base form be; esan supplied am, is, and are; wesan supplied was and were.

- Many people have to be reminded that there is no such thing as a kudo: The noun kudos is singular, from the Greek word for glory.

- English has about twenty-five irregular verbs that don’t change their forms in the past tense, such as cut, set, and put. These verbs are ambiguous between past and nonpast: On Tuesday I put the trash out could mean last Tuesday, next Tuesday, or every Tuesday.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you’ve read The Language Instinct, you don’t really need to read this book. It’s very much the same theory, with perhaps some different examples, maybe a slightly different slant. Reading it, there was nothing new to me, and I think that it isn’t new because it was all covered in The Language Instinct (though it may be some other books have filled in some gaps in my knowledge before this, in the interim).

Pinker’s work is reasonably easy to read and well-illustrated with examples; he’s very convincing in the way he sets forth his ideas, which does make me rather tempted to find someone who disagrees with him equally convincingly and see what I think after that. Any ideas, friends?

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.

[Nancy Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for people like me who are interested in linguistics. Beautifully and humorously written, it considers how our brains might be wired to give us instant and instinctual knowledge of how to properly use grammar. Yes, sometimes we goof, but that is the exception rather than the rule although one would expect far more errors in such an extremely complicated endeavor.
Wild guess here, my opinion only: 3 year old kids have a far more sophisticated grasp on language than the most complex AI I know of.
Pinker discusses people with certain injuries, brain damage or genetic defects that cause specificlanguage problems. These studies have been very helpful in pinpointing certain areas of the brain responsible for different language functions. It's not just Broca and Wernicke. A lot of it is circuitry.

[Katya Epstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This man is a great writer. He explains familiar rules in a way that is not only more interesting and comprehensible than the standard expositions, but also gives you a completely new understanding of what the rule is about.
That said, the book is very repetitive.The first three chapters are a very entertaining presentation of the relevant phenomena and his argument about how the mind creates speech. In the following six chapters he presents all of the evidence he can find to support his theory: Same argument, over and over again, with evidence from different disciplines. If you love detail, want tons of examples, or are planning to write a paper about Pinker's "words and rules" theory, read them. Otherwise skip to the last chapter, in which he extrapolates on how the mind works in general.

[Troy Blackford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful exploration of language and cognition from the world expert on both, this book explores the processes in the brain that enable us to describe the world around us. Additionally, it sheds light on the history of irregular verb forms. It might be hard to see how an in-depth study of regular and irregular verbs could illuminate so much about how the mind and language work, but after you've read this, you will be puzzled no longer. One of the best language books I've encountered.

[Baal Of · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a deep dive into an area I don't know very well, so my opinions are pretty irrelevant. I found this to be a fascinating read, but I can understand why most people would find it somewhat boring. Pinker spends a lot of time discussing the minutia of how people form various tenses of verbs, for example, and not just in English but other languages as well. He is clearly arguing from a particular viewpoint, and I don't know enough to judge whether his position would be close to the current scientific consensus, or if there even is one in linguistics, but he does make his arguments clear and persuasive.
The author of the current top review of this book says "He writes from a controversial position as if it were the only view" which is just plain wrong. Throughout the entire book Pinker discusses opposing viewpoints in detail, explaining where the fit the data, and where they don't. In fact it's a major portion of the book, for example where he presents connectionist models and their attempts to replicate human behavior with respect to language. It's like she didn't actually read the book.
I found a lot of consilience between this book and another I read earlier this year, "Surfaces and Essences" by Douglas Hofstadter, especially in the last chapter where he discusses categorization, word clusters, and the development of languages. As Pinker puts it "Darwin himself illustrated his key idea - that the similarities and differences among organisms could be explained by their family history - by analogy to how words change in languages." I love it when disparate books tie together like that.

[Gendou · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers two unassuming grammatical forms, the past and plural tenses. By examining almost exclusively these two parts of grammar, Pinker surveys the history, successes, and failures of two schools of thought with regard to how we (humans) learn and use language.

The connectionist model, which uses artificial neural networks to learn conjugation by studying patterns in an input set of known words and use this to predict the conjugation of new words. Pinker says this fails because the neural networks lack the ability to use variables, necessary to mimic the human habit of recognizing the important features of a new word, such as the head and tail.

Chomskyan model of universal grammar. Pinker shows how this model can't predict interesting features of the plural and past tenses, such as irregular verbs and the learning curve children undergo when they start to understand and use conjugation instead of merely repeating words.

In Pinker's "Words and Rules" theory the human brain under certain conditions, such as remembering an irregular "word" will suppress the conjugation "rule" that would otherwise cause output of the word interpreted as though it were regular instead of irregular. It also explains those mysterious features of language acquisition because the rules are developed after words. It also treats words as complex objects with a "head" and "tail" which govern how we choose to conjugate.

Pinker uses this theory to shed light on some misguided pedantry, defending the names of the Toronto "Maple Leafs" or the fictional monster "Mice-eater".

[M.W. Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Pinker's _Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language_ receives four stars from me based simply on his ability to take a rather dry topic and write about it interesting enough to keep my attention.

I'm unsure why I both this book. I teach language but I'm not much of a linguist. Regardless, I bought it as an audio to help me read it as it tends to be rather dry. I found the reader very good which kept me interested in the text. Pinker's writing is excellent, and he writes so that anyone can understand the science. If you are a student of linguistics, I think this is an excellent book that explains the Words and Rules theory well. If you are mildly interested in this topic, an audio book my be better.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha costado bastante terminarlo, pero la verdad ha sido cosa de mi situación mental más que del libro, así que no tengáis en cuenta el período de lectura como referente.

Ha presentado una teoría sumamente interesante de la que no estaba muy segura de qué esperar. Creo que todos deberíamos leer libros de lingüística para entender mejor qué es o no hablar "bien" (spoiler: nadie habla mal) y por qué deberíamos acabar con el prescriptivismo lingüístico. Saber cómo funcionan las cosas ayuda mucho, aunque sea una teoría aún por demostrar 100% (como todo en este campo).

[Carole Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had some interesting points that related to my field of speech-language pathology. Overall he harped so much on regular and irregular verbs. Would have been easier to digest if he used bullets for main points in the book.

[alex stanley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content is super interesting, but each chapter could be about ten page shorter. Each example was dragged on way too long, and this made the book too dense.

[Maryam Choudhary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teaching applied linguistics for the first time and this book was extremely useful for that. The language frameworks and his approach to breaking them down was particularly accessible to my students.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first Steven Pinker book. It's written well in that it makes material that could be dry and incomprehensible instead both engaging and able to be understood by someone who is not yet as savvy as she'd like to be about some aspects of linguistics and how language functions in the brain. The book also is organized in a way that its subject matter builds understandably on itself throughout and then extends its fundamental premises about regular and irregular verbs to get at the way the brain works more generally and further at the way people work as agents of thought. The second to last chapter runs through the many different neuroimaging technologies now available for the study of how language functions in the brain, which cast a sort of epiphanic light back onto material introduced in the preceding chapters. The investigation doesn't stop here, though. I would like to look into the studies whose conclusions Pinker refutes in the book.

[Becky · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh, this is SO BORING. I can't listen to anymore 500 item example lists of verb forms that follow such and such rule, not to be confused with the 500 items on the example list of verb forms that follow that OTHER rule.

Since a whole lot of this book (at least the parts I've stayed conscious through) seem to indicate that the rules are intuitive and learned as we go, I'm not quite sure why they need to be spelled out in such infinitely particular detail.

I like etymology and stuff... I picked this up because I thought it would be interesting in a similar way. It is not. So, yep, I'm calling it done on this one.

[Charly]

The edition I am currently reading has a hideous '90s purple and orange cover--so that's a downside.

I've found this to be the most philosophical of the linguistics books I've been hoarding lately . . . a good thing so far. Will update when I have the stamina to finish. Since it's not a novel, I've been reading chapters of this, going back and forth to later works . . . a quite enjoyable way to take it all in. The part on causation has blown my mind thus far. First chapter sort of boring.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy knows way too much about language. Still, he did a good job of compacting complex linguistic ideas into understandable vignettes. His witticisms and use of comic strips helped lighten things up as well. I would definitely recommend Words and Rules for anyone looking for a comprehensive and comprehensible crash course in linguistics.

[Meg Briers · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was challenging, I couldn't even listen to music with lyrics (my usual) when reading it. I read it during breaks from my intensive language course that I'm on and it really helped me think about English and questions that I have for the language I'm learning, just a bit on the heavy side for me. Must read more linguistic books soon.

[Prachi Pande · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guy's got me ready to jump into a career in linguistics. In an age when all you have to do to spit out a bestseller is tack 'Quantum' onto the front of the title, this is real, hardcore, purely magnificent science writing.

Neural networks. Neurobiology. Combinatorial languages. Irresistible. ^_^

[Kyle C]

This is a niche example of public-facing linguistics. In his earlier books (especially The Language Instinct, Pinker tried to give an overview of linguistics (from phonetics to syntax to semantics and sociolinguistics), covering various different aspects of language to show how even the most curious trivia can be explained through the discipline of linguistics. To put it simply, this book is primarily concerned with irregular verbs. Why is it that the past tense of "string" is "strung" (and similarly "sting", "stung") but the past tense of "bring" is "brought" and the past tense of "ring" is "rang"? How do speakers know when to add -ed to a verb and when to use an irregular alternative, and how do they know how to form the irregular word? Sometimes the irregular form involves a vowel change (dig-dug, fight-fought, hang-hung), sometimes it involves a devoiced ending (send-sent, lend-lent), sometimes a vowel change and devoicing (keep-kept, sweep-swept) and sometimes no change occurs at all (hit-hit, cut-cut). The same is also true of nouns where English has a default -s marker (bed-beds, car-cars) but also several irregular umlaut nouns (man-men, foot-feet, mouse-mice). While these irregular forms can be explained diachronically by historic vowel shifts, there is no hard-and-fast rule for English speakers today ("shrink" becomes "shrunk" but "think" becomes "thought"). Children must memorize these irregular forms independently.

Pinker is often lumped together with Chomsky as one of the leading advocates of universal grammar but this is not an accurate characterization. Pinker believes that the human brain has an instinct for language, a multi-process computational apparatus spread across different regions of the brain. It is not a preset rulebook of grammatical parameters like Chomsky's x-bar theory. In this book, tackling the specifics of irregular verbs, Pinker shows instead that two cognitive processes are involved in language: the brain clearly memorizes a word and information about it (a root morpheme, its meaning, its grammatical classification, and any irregular form) and then also learns a series of phonological, morphological and syntactic rules (add -ed to verbs to form the past tense, devoice the "d" if preceded by an unvoiced consonant; add -s to make the plural, voice the "s" if the preceding sound is a voiced consonant). The brain retrieves the word but only applies morphological rules if the word calls for it. Chomsky wanted to show that all language production is the result of some pre-programmed principles (e.g. speakers don't just learn that "thought" is the past tense of "think"; the brain has some mysterious root for both words and derives "think" for the present tense and "thought" for the past tense"—a hidden morpheme beneath the surface of daily speech). But looking at both traditional linguistics, as well as psycholinguistics and neuroscience, Pinker shows how the brain produces language through a variety of cognitive procedures working in tandem.

I thought there was a lot of interesting tidbits throughout the book. For example, Pinker develops a lot of argument out of the fact that, in compound nouns, only irregular nouns permit the plural (e.g. we can say "mouse-infested" and "mice-infested"; however, while we can say "rat-infested", it is awkward to say "rats-infested"). This suggested that irregular plural "mice" is not seen as some inflectional derivation of "mouse" but as an alternative root morpheme. Pinker's theory also cogently shows why we produce regular endings for compound words: for many, the plural of "lowlife" is "lowlifes" rather than "lowlives"; the plural of "still life" is "still lifes" and not "still lives"; the plural of "Mickey Mouse" is "Mickey Mouses" and not "Micky Mice". In each of these cases of bahuvrihi nouns, the compound is not technically headed by an irregular noun (a still life is not a kind of life, Mickey Mouse is not really a kind of mouse but a cartoon name), and so the default morphological rules now apply. We can see in our language use how both lexical data and morphological rules work concurrently.

Although written for a general audience, it is a little specialist in topic, but it's a good example of linguistics scholarship which shows how we have an innate understanding of grammar in our brain, rather than Chomsky's hypothetical machine.

[Nomen est Omen · Rating 5 out of 5]

WARNING: IF YOU THINK NON-FICTION SHOULD BE READ BLIND DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW

The book is well constructed and highly informative. The aim of the book goes beyond regularity and irregularity in languages i.e. regular = cat-cats, walk-walked; irregulars = foot-feet, sing-sang-sung. Pinker is attempting to discuss and prove, with overwhelming evidence supported by scientific research, his theory of Words and Rules. Words and Rules here implies Memory and Rules.

Throughout the first sections of the book, Pinker introduces bases and premises, more-or-less, for contemporary linguistics, at least i.e. what are irregulars, the recursiveness of language, morphology, syntax, semantics, etc. simply for the reader to know.

Later he discusses other proposed theories that attempted to explain regularity and irregularity in language. From Chomsky and Halle's perspective (Generative Phonology), and Rumelhart and Mcclelland's perspective using the associative model (connectionist). He will show the instances in which the two approaches fail. In most cases the connectionist approach fails to deal with regulars and does fairly well with irregulars (more-or-less). And the Chomsky and Halle's All Rules approach is the mirror image of the aforementioned; well with regulars, with irregulars not so.

The Words and Rules theory combines both approaches. It states that irregulars are memorized, and regulars are not so much. Regulars rely on rules almost exclusively. Of course, the memory is accessed, Pinker states, in cases in which words are commonly used instead of going through a whole new computational procedure every time one wants to use a word.

The distinction between memory and rules will be evidenced by experiments such as priming tests, wug-tests, etc. On subjects such as children, agrammatics (patients that are incapable of using grammar rules), anomatics (patients who have difficulty naming objects), etc. And will also explore brain activity using modern technology fMRI, MRI, PET (abbreviation which I admit, cannot recall what do they abbreviate) which might help Pinker state the case that V patient with damage to their Y area has difficulty using irregulars but not regulars, and X patient with damaged Z area has difficulty in using grammar but not using irregulars.

At the end, he claims the parallel similarities between words and evolutionary speciation. And that the mind operates by the Classical (Aristotalion) categorization and the modern family resemblance categorization; which corresponds with his Words and Theory model of operation. In his third to the last paragraph of the book he states it thus:

"We have seen that much of the richness of language comes from the tension between words and rules. In the same way, much of the richness of the public sphere of life come from tensions between family resemblance categories built from experience and the classical categories defined by science, law, or custom".

To know how these two ideas are in harmony with one another, one must read the book.

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a great deal of overlap with Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, which I have previously reviewed on GoodReads:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Pinker, considered the world’s leading expert on language and the mind, has created yet another masterpiece that explains our language instinct and how the brain is fitted, through evolution, with mechanisms to understand and produce linguistic constructs. A toddler is far better equipped to talk than to comprehend how various things work in our world. S/he uses a mental grammar—the rules—along with words known to him/her from an enormous collection of words, that is, symbols for objects and ideas. The said toddler is capable of using word-formation rules to invent new words, such as "breaked" and "holded," that s/he could not have parroted from someone else.

Boundless combinations can be created by using a relatively small set of rules and a vast collection of words or symbols. These combinations can be used for communicating with our fellow humans or to create wordplays and poetry. A handful of rules suffice for creating a complete toy grammar. We can recognize a spoken or written word in a small fraction of a second, and we are just as quick in finding a word to name an object.

Pinker devotes much space to the discussion of irregular forms, especially those related to the English past tense. One observation is that irregular forms were originally regular but changed over a long period of time due to errors and distortions in their transmission or to simplify their pronunciation. Newer additions to a language almost always take regular forms and people tend to use regular forms for notions that are unfamiliar or have not been used for a long time.

Pinker presents his ideas in 10 chapters.

- The infinite library

- Dissection by Linguistics

- Broken telephone

- In single combat

- Word nerds

- Of mice and men

- Kids say the darnedest things

- The horrors of the German language

- The black box

- A digital mind in an analog world

One common criticism of this book, and some of Pinker’s other works addressed to a general audience, is that he does not give other viewpoints much weight, leaving the reader with the impression that his theories are generally accepted and noncontroversial. This is far from being the case for language-acquisition ability, where competing theories are still being hotly debated.

[Gregory Eakins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The very obliviousness to the details of the verb that makes a rule so powerful can let it blindly jam a suffix onto the end of an inhospitable sound. The result can be an uneuphonious tongue-twister such as edited or sixths. Monstrosities like these are never found among the irregulars, which all have standard Anglo-Saxon word sounds such as grew and strode and clung, which please the ear and roll off the tongue.

Much as in, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker wields his colossal knowledge of language to pick apart and establish some modicum of rules and structure in the English language. His main target is how we mentally handle regular and irregular verbs. How do we change freeze to froze, or find to found? What's going on in our brains? How do people, especially children, cope with encountering new irregular verbs?

Let's face it - linguistics is boring, yet somehow Pinker keeps it fresh by constantly dropping fun bits of linguistic knowledge, pulling for all sorts of unexpected sources. Even so - he does continue to go back to many of the same irregular verbs (though in different contexts) over and over to drive home his points.

For such a dull subject, Words and Rules is actually quite the page turner, especially in the first half of the book. Chapters like, The Horrors of the German Language really help us understand how bad a language can be and help us appreciate that English, bad as it is in those dark, irregular corners, is actually a rather good language (from a rule-following standpoint). There is so much here to learn about your language if you are an English speaker, and this may even spark your interest in linguistics.

[Boethia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since many reviewers describe Pinker's books as rather readable, I was pretty surprised by the fact I struggled quite a bit with this book. Although the topics of the individual chapters are definitely interesting (my favourite being The Horrors of the German language), Pinker's not an expert at keeping the reader's attention - at least that's the notion I got; mainly because of his borderline obsessive tendency to provide countless, absolutely exhaustive lists of examples, so it almost arouses the idea of a student desperately trying to reach the minimum word count in his thesis, or - which is more likely - an equally desperate attempt to prove his own proposition, which is not needed at all, as he manages to be quite persuasive even when listing just a few examples.

However, I'm at fault as well, as it probably wasn't the best idea to read this book in my native language (obviously not English). Though the translation was very well done and I'm sure it'd make the book interesting even for people without good command of the English language, it didn't felt exactly intuitive to constantly ''mind-switch'' between the two languages.

Ultimately, the theme (and sole focus just on verbs) of this book is a double-edged sword. It's almost equally fascinating and, unfortunately, quite often also tedious.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Words and Rules is a real page turner. Who knew that irregular verbs could be so fascinating? But, like many Steven Pinker books, Words and Rules drags on a bit. Pinker wants to explain every facet from every angle until all the sing-sang-sungs start to blend into one big blob and I wished for the book to end.

My favourite bit of the book had me silently mouth "sing...sang...sung" to focus my attention on the 5 attributes of a vowel sound and how my mouth's shape changes to make each one. Did you know that the difference in mouth shape between sing and sang is that the hump of the tongue moves further back in your mouth as you say the past tense form. Did you know that your tongue performs the same trick when you say most irregular past tense forms? There are lots of delicious little nuggets like that one in Words and Rules.

I'm glad I read the book but I was relieved to come to the end.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciate the (irregular) words and rules hypothesis presented in this book. The other day, a friend and I tried to come up with a word for "to admire and appreciate". We couldn't recall a good word, so we agreed to coin "apprire", in which I then consciously inflected in the sentence "I've always apprired your approach to life."

Once you understand the proposed inflection model presented in this book, it's so easy to recognize its applications in our everyday lives. It's also great that there's a chapter that hones in the neurological basis of our ability to learn/use words and rules, another that explains the frequency distribution that lets irregular words survive or not, and the commonality of this concept among several languages that help establish the words and rules concept in memory.

Some annoyances in the audiobook are how butchered the chinese was and how much the book drags when examples are being read. The latter is hard to solve; the former is unexcusable: I don't expect non-tonal language speakers to nail tones, but butchering vowel sounds that do exist in the their phonetic inventory is unjustifiable. (eg. 個，should use a schwa, not a mid-high front vowel.)

[Kevin Y Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a lot of fun reading this. The main point is that the language faculty involves both rules (regular verbs) and a lexicon that is mostly arbitrary but still exhibits patterns (irregular verbs). The rules part overlaps a lot with Pinker's other books, esp. Language Instinct. The pattern matching part was really interesting though, particularly his arguments around what things are explained well by a pattern matching model, and what things are not.

It's unfortunate that these general-audience linguistics books always have to perform the ritual of spending 50 pages discussing the -s/-ed phonological rules in English and tediously listing out examples of all the different cases. Words and Rules does it at the very beginning, which I think is the biggest problem with the book. Just skim through it and save your brain energy for reading about the cooler things later on.